Search Shop

The New Concert Hall, University of South Wales, Cardiff
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell
Total duration: 116 minutes 34 seconds

‘These are marvellous songs’ --Oxford Times

Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems would have been one of Gerald Finzi’s desert island choices. Not that he was ever himself marooned; but at the outbreak of the last war his friend the composer Robin Milford was isolated on Guernsey and, in discussing Hardy, Finzi wrote to him that ‘if I had to be cut off from everything that would be the one book I should choose’. More poignantly he wrote in 1949 to another friend that there were perhaps another hundred poems of Hardy which attracted him, but he suspected he’d go to his grave with most of them unset. This is borne out by his copy of the Collected Poems, in which he has lightly crossed through those he has set, and marked those he would like to set. There are many more marked than crossed through. Even so, he completed setting over fifty of Hardy’s poems, forty-three of them recorded here.

‘There are so many really subtle and distinguished performances in this set, and so much sheerly beautiful singing, that I shall be listening to it often over the years’ --Gramophone

Show

Contents and Reviews

CD1
Earth and Air and Rain, Op 15
1 No 01: Summer Schemes 'When friendly summer calls again'
2 No 02: When I set out for Lyonnesse
3 No 03: Waiting Both 'A star looks down at me'
4 No 04: The Phantom 'Queer are the ways of a man I know'
5 No 05: So I have fared 'Simple was I and was young'
6 No 06: Rollicum-rorum 'When lawyers strive to heal a breach'
7 No 07: To Lizbie Browne 'Dear Lizbie Browne'
8 No 08: The Clock of the Years 'A spirit passed before my face'
9 No 09: In a Churchyard 'It is sad that so many of worth'
10 No 10: Proud Songsters 'The thrushes sing as the sun is going'
Till Earth outwears, Op 19a
11 No 1: Let me enjoy the earth
12 No 2: In years defaced
13 No 3: The Market-Girl 'Nobody took any notice of her as she stood on the causey kerb'
14 No 4: I look into my glass
15 No 5: It never looks like summer here
16 No 6: At a lunar eclipse 'Thy shadow, earth, from pole to central sea'
17 No 7: Life Laughs Onward 'Rambling I looked for an old abode'
I said to Love, Op 19b
18 No 1: I need not go
19 No 2: At Middle-Field Gate in February 'The bars are thick with drops that show'
20 No 3: Two Lips 'I kissed them in fancy as I came away in the morning glow'
21 No 4: In five-score summers
22 No 5: For Life I had never cared greatly
23 No 6: I said to Love
CD2
A Young Man's Exhortation, Op 14
1 Group 1 No 1: A Young Man's Exhortation 'Call off your eyes from care'
2 Group 1 No 2: Ditty 'Beneath a knap where flown'
3 Group 1 No 3: Budmouth Dears 'When we lay where Budmouth Beach is, o the girls were fresh as peaches'
4 Group 1 No 4: Her Temple 'Dear, think not that they will forget you'
5 Group 1 No 5: The Comet at Yell'ham 'It bends far over Yell'ham Plain'
6 Group 2 No 1: Shortening Days 'The first fire since summer is lit, and it smoking into the room'
7 Group 2 No 2: The Sigh 'Little head against my shoulder'
8 Group 2 No 3: Former Beauties 'These market-dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn'
9 Group 2 No 4: Transformations 'Portion of this yew is a man my grandshire new'
10 Group 2 No 5: The Dance Continued 'Regret not me; beneath the sunny tree'
Before and After Summer, Op 16
11 No 01: Childhood among the Ferns 'I sat one sprinkling day upon the lea'
12 No 02: Before and After Summer 'Looking forward to the spring'
13 No 03: The Self-Unseeing 'Here is the ancient floor, footworn and hollowed and thin'
14 No 04: Overlooking the River 'The swallows flew in the curves of an eight'
15 No 05: Channel Firing 'That night your great guns, unawares'
16 No 06: In the Mind's Eye 'That was once her casement, and the taper nigh'
17 No 07: The Too Short Time 'Nine leaves a minute swim down shakily'
18 No 08: Epeisodia 'Past the hills that peep'
19 No 09: Amabel 'I marked her ruined hues'
20 No 10: He Abjures Love 'At last I put off love, for twice ten years'